Recent reviews by Dr Damo

Incredibly well polished for a game in early access. I'm only 18 hours in, but there is a lot more content, and I haven't even started on optimising my factory! A great mix of Factorio and Satisfactory, sited in an underground wilderness similar to Deep Rock Galactic, but with much greater variety and vegetation. Highly recommended if you like exploration and building games, especially if you are a fan of factory builders.

Combines a wonderful mix of rewarding exploration with a driving narrative and well-paced horror. Absolutely do recommend. Five stars.

Honestly the best short game I have played in over ten years, hands down. Wonderful selection of game-play elements and plot twists. Highly recommended.

Do not buy this game, it is worth maybe $10, for the amount of gameplay, and that is if you really like the genre, which is not as advertised. This game lies to you right from the start - even the advertising misrepresents the game.

Right, lets start with the blurb:
EVERSPACE™ combines fast-paced combat with roguelike elements, great visuals and a captivating story. It takes you on a challenging journey through an ever-changing, beautifully crafted universe full of surprises. Shoot, craft and loot your way to victory while the odds are stacked against you.

Rougelike: Not by any means. Definition from WP: "Roguelike is a subgenre of role-playing video games, characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated game levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player-character." The game is procedurally generated, but that is the only similarity.

Great visuals: Sure, looks pretty good.

Captivating Story: It doesn't have one. No, really. Apart from some short dialogue at the start trying to explain away the death-grind. I'd imagine there might be some dialogue drops later on, but the game doesn't really have the depth or complexity to hold a decent story together - it would be just like reading a book seperately detatched from the game.

Challenging Journey: It is hard and expects you to die extremely often, in fact it seems to be part of the game to die at least 20 times before getting anywhere. Journey? What? Spawn, fight/avoid ships for 5 minutes, die. Hardly enough to call a task, let alone a journey.

Ever-changing: It is procedurally generated (gets repetitive fast).

Beautifully crafted universe: What? It is a set of small procedurally generated levels, not a universe.

Surprises: You touched a station/waited more than 4 minutes/the stars aligned. Have a gank squad and die in 5 seconds flat. Very lazy programming and so gameplay, really.

Shoot, craft and loot: this kind of implies that you have an inventory and there is a crafting system. There isn't. If you get enough materials, you can upgrade weapons/build more missiles/mines. Thats it. No changing or forking tech tree gameplay, and most importantly, NO PERSISTENT UPGRADES/MATERIALS. You die, all your weapons, tools and materials are gone.

Pros:
- Nice graphics.
- Good fighting feel.

Cons:
- No persistent ships, inventories or really character advancement (there is an XP system, but only really helps if you grind for hours).
- No real story, just pieces of found dialogue.
- No larger universe, just the five or so procedurally generated increasingly hard systems. You can't go back, you can't grind to help yourself in the harder areas.

What I thought from the advertising: Freelancer Mk2! Wonderful big universe with customisable ships! Character progression!

What I got: Tiny, procedurally generated, hard and forced gameplay, with no real depth or character. Would not buy again. Shame on the developers for pushing this as any more than a game for a few minutes of casual play.

Scope has no depth - it is a screen on the back of the rifle. Use the laser pointer that the enemies can't see or get eye strain, you decide.

Absolutely beautiful and very well designed. I would buy it again for twice the price.

At first it appears childish, but has wonderful complexities and hidden depths, beyond what the target audience appears to be.

The art and character design is wonderful, the music and ambient sound draws you into the game. The well-written email and message based background story ties the world and the character together wonderfully. The added in-game wiki and tutorials mean that you can get more depth and understanding of the interaction between in-game elements and turn your grind into a great experiment. The only thing that would bring me up short is the distance between game locations - the game seems to suffer slighly by the over-extension of the world so that it takes longer to do anything as you spend so much time walking between your farming elements as well as through the world.

As someone who generally plays AAA games and open world explorers, I wholely recommend it. Five stars - no joke.

Pros:
-Very nice quick bow work, good draw, aim and fire.
-Good graphics.
-Cheap.

Cons:
-Very little gameplay elements, just one tower system to sit in and shoot (one map).
-No rounds, just increasingly large waves (i.e. no real goals, just see how long you last).
-Bad guys shoot you through each other, from the other end of the map, and with perfect accuracy.
-You die in one hit.
-No idea of how to teleport, had to figure that out.
-No tutorial.
-No warning about when you are about to be dragoned to death (just sudden fire if you didn't see it coming due to watching guys behind you).

All in all, promising, but needs structure, a tutorial and more maps/goals.